Quote:As per-core performance improvements at the microarchitectural level have largely dried up, clock speeds have become a last resort for gaining demonstrable improvements from generation to generation for today's desktop CPUs. It's no longer going to be possible for companies to leave clock-speed margins on the table through imprecise or conservative characterization and binning practices—margins that give casual overclockers reason to tweak to begin with. Tomorrow's chips are going to get smarter and smarter about their own capabilities and exploit the vast majority of their potential through awareness of their own electrical and thermal limits, too.
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The slim pickings of overclocking headroom for casual tweakers these days doesn't stop with CPUs, either. Nvidia's Pascal graphics cards enjoy a deadly-effective dynamic-voltage-and-frequency-scaling algorithm of their own in GPU Boost 3.0. Grab a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti equipped with any massive air cooler or hybrid arrangement, for just one example, and you're already within single digits of the GP102 GPU's potential.
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As we run harder and harder into the limits of silicon, today's newly-competitive CPU market will require all chip makers to squeeze every drop of performance they can out of their products at the factory to set apart their high-end products and motivate upgraders. We'll likely see similar sophistication from future graphics cards, too. Leaving hundreds of Hertz on the table doesn't make dollars or sense for chip makers, and casual overclockers likely will be left with thinner and thinner pickings to extract through manual tweaking. If the behavior of today's cutting-edge chips is any indication, however, we'll have more time to game and create. Perhaps the end of casual overclocking won't be entirely sad as a result.